Send us Fan Mail What if the clearest signal about your brain’s future isn’t hidden inside an MRI, but floating in your blood right now? We dig into Neurofilament Light Chain (NFL), a nervous system biomarker that behaves like a smoke alarm for ongoing nerve damage and could help shift brain health from reactive to proactive. We anchor the story in a remarkable study of 495 Japanese centenarians followed for up to 17 years. Researchers measured amyloid beta, phosphorylated tau, and NFL, and ...
Jun 27
24 min
Send us Fan Mail You’ve heard the standard dementia prevention script: eat well, sleep more, do the puzzles, and hope for good genes. Then a result lands that doesn’t fit the script at all, a routine shingles vaccine associated with a 33% lower risk of dementia in a real-world study of 1.5 million Medicare patients. We dig into what that finding does and does not mean, why it’s so hard to dismiss, and how it compares to the modest wins medicine has chased for decades with expensive Alzheimer’...
Jun 26
22 min
Send us Fan Mail Alzheimer’s has been sold to all of us as a neuron story: plaques, tangles, and brain cells fading away. But the data we walk through here points to a more unsettling possibility that the real tipping point is structural. When the brain’s blood vessels fail, memory can fall apart even faster, and what looks like “classic Alzheimer’s dementia” may actually be a vascular collapse hiding in plain sight. We unpack a large autopsy analysis from the NACC database and use it to zoo...
Jun 25
19 min
Send us Fan Mail A medical breakthrough can still fail at the pharmacy counter. We finally have amyloid-targeting drugs for early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, and they are already on the market, but several major health systems have looked at the same evidence and refused to pay. That contradiction is the mystery we unpack, using the explosive Glasgow IPCAD meeting as our guide to what’s really blocking access. We dig into the three barriers driving negative reimbursement decisions: headline d...
Jun 24
19 min
Send us Fan Mail A camera watches you walk across a room and can estimate your biological age. That sounds like science fiction until you see the data and the logic behind it. We break down a 2026 multidimensional modeling study that replaces the idea of “age as a number” with age as measurable wear and tear across your body and brain, using tools that are surprisingly practical: a marker-free 3D gait camera, a VR eye-tracking test, a soft fNIRS cap for brain connectivity, and a simple blood ...
Jun 23
23 min
Send us Fan Mail Depression and dementia get talked about like two separate problems, until you ask the uncomfortable question: which one comes first? We dig into a huge 22-year longitudinal study (over 13,000 Americans in the Health and Retirement Study) to figure out whether depressive symptoms are a modifiable dementia risk factor or an early clinical warning sign of Alzheimer’s disease and related neurodegenerative pathology. The timeline turns out to be the tell. When depressive symptom...
Jun 22
16 min
Send us Fan Mail Think your daily health choices only matter for your heart and waistline? The research we’re unpacking challenges that assumption and makes a sharper, more urgent claim: the same habits may interact with silent Alzheimer’s pathology in your brain years before any symptom shows up. We walk through a major analysis combining the A4 and LEARN cohorts (1,707 cognitively unimpaired adults ages 65 to 85) and explain how PET scans split people into amyloid beta positive and amyloid ...
Jun 21
22 min
Send us Fan Mail Fish oil has a near-halo status in nutrition culture: a simple, golden capsule that promises better memory, sharper thinking, and protection from cognitive decline. But a landmark longitudinal analysis using ADNI data and published in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease forces a rethink, suggesting omega-3 supplement use in older adults may be linked to accelerated decline on major cognitive and functional scales. That tension between “common wisdom” and long-ter...
Jun 20
19 min
Send us Fan Mail The data point that stops us cold: at the same level of Alzheimer’s pathology, people living alone can score higher on cognitive testing than people living with others. We walk through a mind-bending April 2026 study that pulls from more than 11,000 participants and asks two deceptively simple questions with enormous stakes for brain health and aging: are you partnered, and do you live alone? We break down how the researchers combine hard biology with real-world life structu...
Jun 19
21 min
Send us Fan Mail Alzheimer’s is coming at the world like a demographic tidal wave and the hardest part is admitting what we still can’t do: there’s no cure. But what we can do is changing quickly, and the most surprising shift is where the real cognitive gains might come from. We dig into a major 2026 Bayesian network meta-analysis spanning 57 randomized controlled trials and 6,737 people, asking one high-stakes question: when the goal is improving global cognitive function, do prescription d...
Jun 18
22 min
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